This invention relates to the automated assistance of a telephony call centre agent. In particular it relates to a method and system for providing dialogue suggestions to an agent during an agent caller interaction.
A call centre can be defined as a place in a company or business that handles incoming and/or outgoing calls from/to its customers in support of its day-to-day operation. This can be a telemarketing area, where the employees make outgoing calls to try and sell the company""s products. It can be a service area that receives incoming calls from its customers for repair or maintenance of the company""s goods or services. A call centre will have a telephone system which may be as simple as a small single-line phone, increasing in complexity up to a large multi-node PBX. A call centre would normally have a computerized system for tracking, logging and recording call details, although some simply use paper forms. It may have one operator or agent, or it may have many, depending on the size of the company or business.
A call centre company needs to ensure quality control on their agents performance in an interaction with a caller in order to maintain customer satisfaction and to keep an acceptable call rate through each agent. One way to educate agents is to record their interaction with a caller and have a supervisor go through the recording and discuss possible problems and area of improvement. However this education is performed off line and is expensive in human resource terms. Much cheaper is an automatic prompt system offering hints and suggestions to the caller.
British patent application GB2333 173 discloses an intelligent human computer interface providing real time context data in relation to automatically recognized input signals. The system monitors in real time the operator and caller speech input to extract a subject matter. Once the subject has been identified an action is determined to provide useful data to the agent such as a database link. This may involve querying one or more databases with the extracted subject and providing visual data based on the result. This prior art solution provides data based on analyzed text from one or other of the conversations and does not offer any useful information based on the performance of the agent or on the state of the interaction.
In one aspect of the present invention there is provided an interactive voice response application as claimed in claim 1 and a method of interactive voice recognition as in claim 10. Therefore the invention provides a method of making suggestions and comments on the interaction between the agent and the caller that has only been previously possible with a human supervisor. The invention provides a suggestion to the agent that can be used to counter a particular (e.g. confrontational) key word spoken by a caller. The agent can be provided with one or more possible alternatives so that they can chose the most appropriate. Furthermore the invention provides a comment to the agent to his own dialogue so that if the agent is being is using inappropriate language (e.g. confrontational) a polite alternative or alternatives can be suggested for next time.
Advantageously the means for providing a key word suggestion comprises: means for providing an alternative key word if the originator is the call centre agent; and means for providing a counter key word or phrase if the originator is the caller. Preferably each key word is stored in a field of a record in a key word table, a further field stores an alternative word and a further field stores the counter word so that once the keyword is known the alternative or counter words may be acquired by lookup. These provides a simple and quick method of providing supervision to an interaction.
In the preferred embodiment the IVR application further comprises means for placing comments and suggestions on the caller workstation as the call is being placed so that the agent can have suggestions in real time as the call is going through and helpful suggestions can be chosen from to aid the interaction.
In the preferred embodiment the IVR application further comprises means for storing the dialogue text and the comment and suggestion text together for later retrieval so that an agent can review past performance, see the text version of the dialogue and compare the suggestions and comments.
In the preferred embodiment the IVR application further comprises means for grading each computer readable text with respect to the key word text so that a total grade for the interaction may be found. A further field in the key word table stores most advantageously stores a value for the key word being an subjective grading of the strength of inappropriateness or in the present embodiment a subjective grading of the strength of confrontation of the keyword. In this embodiment each key word in a dialogue line takes away the value of that keyword from the total grade. The IVR application further comprises means for storing the individual grade and the overall grade together with the dialogue text.
A key word means a single word or groups of words that form a phrase.
In this description the word xe2x80x98callerxe2x80x99 represents not only a party making an incoming telephone call but also a party that is the recipient of a telephone call.